The Seagate FireCuda 520 is a solid-state drive in the M.2 2280 form factor, launched on November 30th, 2019. It is available in capacities ranging from 500 GB to 2 TB. This page reports specifications for the 1 TB variant. With the rest of the system, the Seagate FireCuda 520 interfaces using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection. The SSD controller is the PS5016-E16-32 from Phison, a DRAM cache chip is available. Seagate has installed 96-layer TLC NAND flash on the FireCuda 520, the flash chips are made by Toshiba. Please note that this SSD is sold in multiple variants with different NAND flash or controller, which could affect performance, the "Notes" section at the end of this page has more info. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are handled more quickly. The cache is sized at 370 GB. Copying data out of the SLC cache (folding) completes at 600 MB/s. Thanks to support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface, performance is excellent. The FireCuda 520 is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 5,000 MB/s and 4,400 MB/s write; random IO reaches 760K IOPS for read and 700K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 250 USD. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Seagate guarantees an endurance rating of 1800 TBW, a good value.